Pay phones? What are those?

A row of pay phones sits at the Powell Street BART station in San Francisco, Calif., but few people use them on the whole. Pay phones are going the way of the Dodo, with fewer and fewer of them visible as more and more people turn to cell phones and the internet for communication. less

A row of pay phones sits at the Powell Street BART station in San Francisco, Calif., but few people use them on the whole. Pay phones are going the way of the Dodo, with fewer and fewer of them visible as more ... more

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

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BART patrons walks past pay phones at the Powell Street BART station in San Francisco, Calif.

BART patrons walks past pay phones at the Powell Street BART station in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

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Danny Thomas of San Francisco makes a call on a pay phone on the corner of Sixth Street and Market Street in San Francisco, Calif.

Danny Thomas of San Francisco makes a call on a pay phone on the corner of Sixth Street and Market Street in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

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A BART patron walks past a row of pay phones at the Powell Street BART station in San Francisco, Calif.

A BART patron walks past a row of pay phones at the Powell Street BART station in San Francisco, Calif.

Photo: Carlos Avila Gonzalez / The Chronicle

Pay phones? What are those?

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A full generation has now come of age never having had to use a pay phone — but that doesn’t mean the street-corner descendants of Clark Kent’s changing room are all gone.

There are, in fact, still 300,000 phone booths left in America, including a couple of hundred in San Francisco. They’re not the full-sized booths of old, and their total is a far cry from 1998’s peak of 2.6 million, but a lot of people still find them useful.